III. Heat Death
The Harp at the End of the Universe
Amy Nam - harpist and harp music composer
Sean William Calhoun - electronics
Marc Webster (Blue on Blue Recording) - videographer, producer, and audio engineer
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What is the ultimate fate of our universe?
I process ideas by writing music. When I read “The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking)” by Dr. Katie Mack, a book that seeks to answer the “how will it all end?” question with thrilling descriptions of the cosmological models for the end of the cosmos, I just had to take a go at translating these concepts into sound.
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III. Heat Death
Astrophysicists consider Heat Death to be the universe’s most likely doom. Right now, when we observe the skies, we can see that all extraterrestrial objects are moving away from us, with the most distant objects moving away the fastest. If the universe is open and saddle-shaped, or if it’s flat but contains dark energy described by a cosmological constant, gravity cannot overcome the expansion of space, which will continue forever. In such a forever-expanding universe, over unfathomable time scales, all matter will finally decay into fundamental particles. The universe will reach maximum entropy, and then, nothing can happen.
“A cosmological-constant-induced apocalypse is a slow and agonizing one, marked by increasing isolation, inexorable decay, and an eons-long fade into darkness. In some sense, it doesn’t end the universe exactly, but rather ends everything in it, and renders it null and void,” explains Dr. Mack. “Galaxies whose distant past we can see now will slowly fade into darkness like ancient decaying photographs. In our own cosmic neighborhood, after the Milky Way and Andromeda merge, our little Local Group of galaxies will become more and more isolated, surrounded by darkness and the dying primordial light. All across the cosmos, invisible to us, other groups and clusters of galaxies will merge to form giant elliptical clumps of stars, burning brightly in the initial violence of the collisions but fading eventually to embers, whose glow will never reach beyond their own pool of expanding, emptying space. Eventually, each new, dying supergalaxy will be utterly alone. …Black holes will grow, for a time. Some will engulf galaxies’ wroth of dead stellar remnants; some will stall in their growth, with no new matter approaching close enough to be consumed. When the stars have all faded to darkness, the ultimate decay sets in. Black holes begin to evaporate. …Eventually, when the stars have burned out and the particles have decayed and the black holes have all evaporated, the universe is basically empty space with only a cosmological constant in it, expanding exponentially. …When the universe gets to this pure de Sitter state, it is a maximum entropy universe. From that point on, there is no way for the universe’s total entropy to increase, which means, in a very real sense, the arrow of time is… gone.”
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